Books & Poetry

Picador has done David Thewlis few favours in its marketing of this, his first novel. In ensuring that the jacket is adorned by quotes from two of his celebrity chums – Jake Chapman and Billy Connolly – it has handed his head on a plate to cynical critics. The twin facts that a) Chapman appears in the novel and b) Thewlis is due to appear in a Chapman brothers biopic may further grate.

Thewlis has balls, nevertheless. Locating the action of his novel in the beyond-satire milieu of the BritArt world was always going to be a risky move. It’s evidently a world Thewlis knows intimately, and he even namedrops his friend Stuart Pearson Wright, who painted the cover image. Our hero, Hector Kipling, seems to have it all: a beautiful Cretan girlfriend, a successful career and near-psychotic mates. The worst he has to contend with are a best friend who’s been nominated for the Turner Prize and a mother who thinks the Chapman brothers are ‘really seriously poorly’. Thewlis is good on wry domestic detail – by far the most appealing character is Hector’s dad, who on occasion sounds like a ‘Lancastrian Robert De Niro’ and has to retire to bed with a ‘fever and a book about shelving’.

These Hornbyesque moments sit uneasily, however, with the dark satire you sense Thewlis really wants to write. The novel gains in conviction as Hector’s life starts to unravel, and its conclusion is hideous and merciless. But readers may have ceased caring by this point, exhausted by the rhetorical dialogue and gothic tone.